Demonologia : $b or, natural knowledge revealed; being an exposé of ancient and modern superstitions, credulity, fanaticism, enthusiasm, & imposture, as connected with the doctrine, caballa, and jargon, of amulets, apparitions, astrology, charms, demonology, devils, divination, dreams, deuteroscopia, effluvia, fatalism, fate, friars, ghosts, gipsies, hell, hypocrites, incantations, inquisition, jugglers, legends, magic, magicians, miracles, monks, nymphs, oracles, physiognomy, purgatory, predestForsyth, J. S.
History
Demonologia : $b or, natural knowledge revealed; being an exposé of ancient and modern superstitions, credulity, fanaticism, enthusiasm, & imposture, as connected with the doctrine, caballa, and jargon, of amulets, apparitions, astrology, charms, demonology, devils, divination, dreams, deuteroscopia, effluvia, fatalism, fate, friars, ghosts, gipsies, hell, hypocrites, incantations, inquisition, jugglers, legends, magic, magicians, miracles, monks, nymphs, oracles, physiognomy, purgatory, predest
Forsyth, J. S.
Demonology; Superstition; Witchcraft
be it so, will J. Webster say, what is all this to the purpose, when the
book of Tobit is apocryphal, and consequently of no authority? What of
no authority? Certainly of infinitely more authority than Mr. Wagstaff,
Mr. Scot, and Mr. Adie, that Mr. Webster so frequently and reverently
quoteth.
“I but, will he farther add, these apparitions were made to good and
holy men, or to elect vessels; but King Saul was a wretched reprobate.
This is the third liberal badge of honour that this ill-bred advocate of
the witches has bestowed on a distressed prince. First, a ‘drowned
puppet,’ p. 170, then a ‘distracted bedlam,’ in the same page, which I
passed by before; and now a ‘wretched reprobate.’ But assuredly Saul was
a brave prince and commander, as Josephus justly describes him, and
reprobate only in type, as Ismael and Esau; which is a mystery it seems,
that J. Webster was not aware of. And therefore no such wonder that the
soul of Samuel had such a kindness for him, as to appear to him in the
depth of his distress, to settle his mind, by telling him plainly the
upshot of the whole business, that he should lose the battel, and he and
his sons be slain, that so he might give a specimen of the bravest
valour that ever was atchieved by any commander, in that he would not
suffer his country to be overrun by the enemy while he was alive without
resistance; but though he knew certainly he should fail of success, and
he and his sons dye in the fight, yet in so just and honourable a cause
as the defence of his crown and his country, would give the enemy battel
in the field, and sacrifice his own life for the safety of his people.
Out of the knowledge of which noble spirit in Saul, and his resolved
valour in this point, those words haply may come from Samuel, ‘To morrow
shalt thou and thy sons be with me,’ (as an auspicious insinuation of
their favourable reception into the other world,) in סחיצחצדקימ, _in
thalamo justorum_, as Munster has noted out of the Rabbins.
“Lastly, as for that weak imputation, that this opinion of its being
Samuel’s soul that appeared is Popish, that is very plebeianly and
idiotically spoken, as if every thing that the Popish party are for,
were Popish. We divide our zeal against so many things that we fancy
Popish, that we scarce reserve a just share of detestation against what
is truly so: Such as are that gross, rank and scandalous impossibility
of ‘transubstantiation,’ the various modes of fulsome idolatry and lying
impostures, the uncertainty of their loyalty to their lawful sovereigns
by their superstitious adhesion to the spiritual tyranny of the Pope,
and that barbarous and ferine cruelty against those that are not either
such fools as to be persuaded to believe such things as they would
obtrude upon men, or are not so false to God and their own consciences,
as knowing better, yet to profess them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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